OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Pretty Expressive Printer (with Appendices)
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

Pretty printers make trade-offs between the expressiveness of their pretty printing language, the optimality objective that they minimize when choosing between different ways to lay out a document, and the performance of their algorithm. This paper presents a new pretty printer, $Π_e$, that is strictly more expressive than all pretty printers in the literature and provably minimizes an optimality objective. Furthermore, the time complexity of $Π_e$ is better than many existing pretty printers. When choosing among different ways to lay out a document, $Π_e$ consults a user-supplied cost factory, which determines the optimality objective, giving $Π_e$ a unique degree of flexibility. We use the Lean theorem prover to verify the correctness (validity and optimality) of $Π_e$, and implement $Π_e$ concretely as a pretty printer that we call PrettyExpressive. To evaluate our pretty printer against others, we develop a formal framework for reasoning about the expressiveness of pretty printing languages, and survey pretty printers in the literature, comparing their expressiveness, optimality, worst-case time complexity, and practical running time. Our evaluation shows that PrettyExpressive is efficient and effective at producing optimal layouts. PrettyExpressive has also seen real-world adoption: it serves as a foundation of a code formatter for Racket.
Adversarial Client Detection via Non-parametric Subspace Monitoring in the Internet of Federated Things
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The Internet of Federated Things (IoFT) represents a network of interconnected systems with federated learning as the backbone, facilitating collaborative knowledge acquisition while ensuring data privacy for individual systems. The wide adoption of IoFT, however, is hindered by security concerns, particularly the susceptibility of federated learning networks to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose an effective non-parametric approach FedRR, which leverages the low-rank features of the transmitted parameter updates generated by federated learning to address the adversarial attack problem. Besides, our proposed method is capable of accurately detecting adversarial clients and controlling the false alarm rate under the scenario with no attack occurring. Experiments based on digit recognition using the MNIST datasets validated the advantages of our approach.
A Review of Digital Learning Environments for Teaching Natural Language Processing in K-12 Education
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Natural Language Processing (NLP) plays a significant role in our daily lives and has become an essential part of Artificial Intelligence (AI) education in K-12. As children grow up with NLP-powered applications, it is crucial to introduce NLP concepts to them, fostering their understanding of language processing, language generation, and ethical implications of AI and NLP. This paper presents a comprehensive review of digital learning environments for teaching NLP in K-12. Specifically, it explores existing digital learning tools, discusses how they support specific NLP tasks and procedures, and investigates their explainability and evaluation results in educational contexts. By examining the strengths and limitations of these tools, this literature review sheds light on the current state of NLP learning tools in K-12 education. It aims to guide future research efforts to refine existing tools, develop new ones, and explore more effective and inclusive strategies for integrating NLP into K-12 educational contexts.
Intractability of Learning the Discrete Logarithm with Gradient-Based Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The discrete logarithm problem is a fundamental challenge in number theory with significant implications for cryptographic protocols. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of gradient-based methods for learning the parity bit of the discrete logarithm in finite cyclic groups of prime order. Our main result, supported by theoretical analysis and empirical verification, reveals the concentration of the gradient of the loss function around a fixed point, independent of the logarithm's base used. This concentration property leads to a restricted ability to learn the parity bit efficiently using gradient-based methods, irrespective of the complexity of the network architecture being trained. Our proof relies on Boas-Bellman inequality in inner product spaces and it involves establishing approximate orthogonality of discrete logarithm's parity bit functions through the spectral norm of certain matrices. Empirical experiments using a neural network-based approach further verify the limitations of gradient-based learning, demonstrating the decreasing success rate in predicting the parity bit as the group order increases.
Task-guided Domain Gap Reduction for Monocular Depth Prediction in Endoscopy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Colorectal cancer remains one of the deadliest cancers in the world. In recent years computer-aided methods have aimed to enhance cancer screening and improve the quality and availability of colonoscopies by automatizing sub-tasks. One such task is predicting depth from monocular video frames, which can assist endoscopic navigation. As ground truth depth from standard in-vivo colonoscopy remains unobtainable due to hardware constraints, two approaches have aimed to circumvent the need for real training data: supervised methods trained on labeled synthetic data and self-supervised models trained on unlabeled real data. However, self-supervised methods depend on unreliable loss functions that struggle with edges, self-occlusion, and lighting inconsistency. Methods trained on synthetic data can provide accurate depth for synthetic geometries but do not use any geometric supervisory signal from real data and overfit to synthetic anatomies and properties. This work proposes a novel approach to leverage labeled synthetic and unlabeled real data. While previous domain adaptation methods indiscriminately enforce the distributions of both input data modalities to coincide, we focus on the end task, depth prediction, and translate only essential information between the input domains. Our approach results in more resilient and accurate depth maps of real colonoscopy sequences.
Decision-Dominant Strategic Defense Against Lateral Movement for 5G Zero-Trust Multi-Domain Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-domain warfare is a military doctrine that leverages capabilities from different domains, including air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace, to create a highly interconnected battle network that is difficult for adversaries to disrupt or defeat. However, the adoption of 5G technologies on battlefields presents new vulnerabilities due to the complexity of interconnections and the diversity of software, hardware, and devices from different supply chains. Therefore, establishing a zero-trust architecture for 5G-enabled networks is crucial for continuous monitoring and fast data analytics to protect against targeted attacks. To address these challenges, we propose a proactive end-to-end security scheme that utilizes a 5G satellite-guided air-ground network. Our approach incorporates a decision-dominant learning-based method that can thwart the lateral movement of adversaries targeting critical assets on the battlefield before they can conduct reconnaissance or gain necessary access or credentials. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our game-theoretic design, which uses a meta-learning framework to enable zero-trust monitoring and decision-dominant defense against attackers in emerging multi-domain battlefield networks.
Deciphering Diagnoses: How Large Language Models Explanations Influence Clinical Decision Making
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) utilize evidence-based knowledge and patient data to offer real-time recommendations, with Large Language Models (LLMs) emerging as a promising tool to generate plain-text explanations for medical decisions. This study explores the effectiveness and reliability of LLMs in generating explanations for diagnoses based on patient complaints. Three experienced doctors evaluated LLM-generated explanations of the connection between patient complaints and doctor and model-assigned diagnoses across several stages. Experimental results demonstrated that LLM explanations significantly increased doctors' agreement rates with given diagnoses and highlighted potential errors in LLM outputs, ranging from 5% to 30%. The study underscores the potential and challenges of LLMs in healthcare and emphasizes the need for careful integration and evaluation to ensure patient safety and optimal clinical utility.
Software Testing and Code Refactoring: A Survey with Practitioners
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Nowadays, software testing professionals are commonly required to develop coding skills to work on test automation. One essential skill required from those who code is the ability to implement code refactoring, a valued quality aspect of software development; however, software developers usually encounter obstacles in successfully applying this practice. In this scenario, the present study aims to explore how software testing professionals (e.g., software testers, test engineers, test analysts, and software QAs) deal with code refactoring to understand the benefits and limitations of this practice in the context of software testing. We followed the guidelines to conduct surveys in software engineering and applied three sampling techniques, namely convenience sampling, purposive sampling, and snowballing sampling, to collect data from testing professionals. We received answers from 80 individuals reporting their experience refactoring the code of automated tests. We concluded that in the context of software testing, refactoring offers several benefits, such as supporting the maintenance of automated tests and improving the performance of the testing team. However, practitioners might encounter barriers in effectively implementing this practice, in particular, the lack of interest from managers and leaders. Our study raises discussions on the importance of having testing professionals implement refactoring in the code of automated tests, allowing them to improve their coding abilities.
Error Correction for DNA Storage
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

DNA-based storage is an emerging storage technology that provides high information density and long duration. Due to the physical constraints in the reading and writing processes, error correction in DNA storage poses several interesting coding theoretic challenges, some of which are new. In this paper, we give a brief introduction to some of the coding challenges for DNA-based storage, including deletion/insertion correcting codes, codes over sliced channels, and duplication correcting codes.
How Over-Parameterization Slows Down Gradient Descent in Matrix Sensing: The Curses of Symmetry and Initialization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This paper rigorously shows how over-parameterization changes the convergence behaviors of gradient descent (GD) for the matrix sensing problem, where the goal is to recover an unknown low-rank ground-truth matrix from near-isotropic linear measurements. First, we consider the symmetric setting with the symmetric parameterization where $M^* \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times n}$ is a positive semi-definite unknown matrix of rank $r \ll n$, and one uses a symmetric parameterization $XX^\top$ to learn $M^*$. Here $X \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times k}$ with $k > r$ is the factor matrix. We give a novel $Ω(1/T^2)$ lower bound of randomly initialized GD for the over-parameterized case ($k >r$) where $T$ is the number of iterations. This is in stark contrast to the exact-parameterization scenario ($k=r$) where the convergence rate is $\exp (-Ω(T))$. Next, we study asymmetric setting where $M^* \in \mathbb{R}^{n_1 \times n_2}$ is the unknown matrix of rank $r \ll \min\{n_1,n_2\}$, and one uses an asymmetric parameterization $FG^\top$ to learn $M^*$ where $F \in \mathbb{R}^{n_1 \times k}$ and $G \in \mathbb{R}^{n_2 \times k}$. Building on prior work, we give a global exact convergence result of randomly initialized GD for the exact-parameterization case ($k=r$) with an $\exp (-Ω(T))$ rate. Furthermore, we give the first global exact convergence result for the over-parameterization case ($k>r$) with an $\exp(-Ω(α^2 T))$ rate where $α$ is the initialization scale. This linear convergence result in the over-parameterization case is especially significant because one can apply the asymmetric parameterization to the symmetric setting to speed up from $Ω(1/T^2)$ to linear convergence. On the other hand, we propose a novel method that only modifies one step of GD and obtains a convergence rate independent of $α$, recovering the rate in the exact-parameterization case.
TempoNet: Empowering long-term Knee Joint Angle Prediction with Dynamic Temporal Attention in Exoskeleton Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In the realm of exoskeleton control, achieving precise control poses challenges due to the mechanical delay of exoskeletons. To address this, incorporating future gait trajectories as feed-forward input has been proposed. However, existing deep learning models for gait prediction mainly focus on short-term predictions, leaving the long-term performance of these models relatively unexplored. In this study, we present TempoNet, a novel model specifically designed for precise knee joint angle prediction. By harnessing dynamic temporal attention within the Transformer-based architecture, TempoNet surpasses existing models in forecasting knee joint angles over extended time horizons. Notably, our model achieves a remarkable reduction of 10\% to 185\% in Mean Absolute Error (MAE) for 100 ms ahead forecasting compared to other transformer-based models, demonstrating its effectiveness. Furthermore, TempoNet exhibits further reliability and superiority over the baseline Transformer model, outperforming it by 14\% in MAE for the 200 ms prediction horizon. These findings highlight the efficacy of TempoNet in accurately predicting knee joint angles and emphasize the importance of incorporating dynamic temporal attention. TempoNet's capability to enhance knee joint angle prediction accuracy opens up possibilities for precise control, improved rehabilitation outcomes, advanced sports performance analysis, and deeper insights into biomechanical research. Code implementation for the TempoNet model can be found in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/LyesSaadSaoud/TempoNet.
What Determines the Price of NFTs?
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

In the evolving landscape of digital art, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have emerged as a groundbreaking platform, bridging the realms of art and technology. NFTs serve as the foundational framework that has revolutionized the market for digital art, enabling artists to showcase and monetize their creations in unprecedented ways. NFTs combine metadata stored on the blockchain with off-chain data, such as images, to create a novel form of digital ownership. It is not fully understood how these factors come together to determine NFT prices. In this study, we analyze both on-chain and off-chain data of NFT collections trading on OpenSea to understand what influences NFT pricing. Our results show that while text and image data of the NFTs can be used to explain price variations within collections, the extracted features do not generalize to new, unseen collections. Furthermore, we find that an NFT collection's trading volume often relates to its online presence, like social media followers and website traffic.
SelfGraphVQA: A Self-Supervised Graph Neural Network for Scene-based Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The intersection of vision and language is of major interest due to the increased focus on seamless integration between recognition and reasoning. Scene graphs (SGs) have emerged as a useful tool for multimodal image analysis, showing impressive performance in tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). In this work, we demonstrate that despite the effectiveness of scene graphs in VQA tasks, current methods that utilize idealized annotated scene graphs struggle to generalize when using predicted scene graphs extracted from images. To address this issue, we introduce the SelfGraphVQA framework. Our approach extracts a scene graph from an input image using a pre-trained scene graph generator and employs semantically-preserving augmentation with self-supervised techniques. This method improves the utilization of graph representations in VQA tasks by circumventing the need for costly and potentially biased annotated data. By creating alternative views of the extracted graphs through image augmentations, we can learn joint embeddings by optimizing the informational content in their representations using an un-normalized contrastive approach. As we work with SGs, we experiment with three distinct maximization strategies: node-wise, graph-wise, and permutation-equivariant regularization. We empirically showcase the effectiveness of the extracted scene graph for VQA and demonstrate that these approaches enhance overall performance by highlighting the significance of visual information. This offers a more practical solution for VQA tasks that rely on SGs for complex reasoning questions.
Benchmarking and Improving Generator-Validator Consistency of Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

As of September 2023, ChatGPT correctly answers "what is 7+8" with 15, but when asked "7+8=15, True or False" it responds with "False". This inconsistency between generating and validating an answer is prevalent in language models (LMs) and erodes trust. In this paper, we propose a framework for measuring the consistency between generation and validation (which we call generator-validator consistency, or GV-consistency), finding that even GPT-4, a state-of-the-art LM, is GV-consistent only 76% of the time. To improve the consistency of LMs, we propose to finetune on the filtered generator and validator responses that are GV-consistent, and call this approach consistency fine-tuning. We find that this approach improves GV-consistency of Alpaca-30B from 60% to 93%, and the improvement extrapolates to unseen tasks and domains (e.g., GV-consistency for positive style transfers extrapolates to unseen styles like humor). In addition to improving consistency, consistency fine-tuning improves both generator quality and validator accuracy without using any labeled data. Evaluated across 6 tasks, including math questions, knowledge-intensive QA, and instruction following, our method improves the generator quality by 16% and the validator accuracy by 6.3% across all tasks.
Multi-class Network Intrusion Detection with Class Imbalance via LSTM & SMOTE
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Monitoring network traffic to maintain the quality of service (QoS) and to detect network intrusions in a timely and efficient manner is essential. As network traffic is sequential, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) such as long short-term memory (LSTM) are suitable for building network intrusion detection systems. However, in the case of a few dataset examples of the rare attack types, even these networks perform poorly. This paper proposes to use oversampling techniques along with appropriate loss functions to handle class imbalance for the detection of various types of network intrusions. Our deep learning model employs LSTM with fully connected layers to perform multi-class classification of network attacks. We enhance the representation of minority classes: i) through the application of the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE), and ii) by employing categorical focal cross-entropy loss to apply a focal factor to down-weight examples of the majority classes and focus more on hard examples of the minority classes. Extensive experiments on KDD99 and CICIDS2017 datasets show promising results in detecting network intrusions (with many rare attack types, e.g., Probe, R2L, DDoS, PortScan, etc.).
A method of generating bespoke optimised keyboard layouts that significantly reduce typing effort for Twitter users
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

This study addresses the problem of generating an optimised keyboard layout for single-finger typing on a smartphone. It offers Twitter users a tweet-typing experience that requires less effort and time. Bodies of tweet text for 85 popular Twitter users are used. While existing studies have produced optimisations that may generally benefit a variety of users, this study is unique in the sense that a bespoke optimised keyboard layout is generated for each Twitter user based on their own tweets, thereby uniquely benefiting them more than other users. The optimisation process is based on moving only six letter keys from their positions on the QWERTY keyboard, and therefore strikes an effective balance between the typing efficiency improvements offered by an optimised keyboard layout and the effort required to learn to use it. It is shown that a Twitter user will enjoy a reduction in typing effort of at least 13.4%. The typical user will benefit from a 15.8% reduction, while the highest typing effort reduction is nearly 25%. The method presented in this study could therefore be used in practical ways to offer any Twitter user a uniquely-improved tweeting experience.
Route Design in Sheepdog System--Traveling Salesman Problem Formulation and Evolutionary Computation Solution--
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In this study, we consider the guidance control problem of the sheepdog system, which involves the guidance of the flock using the characteristics of the sheepdog and sheep. Sheepdog systems require a strategy to guide sheep agents to a target value using a small number of sheepdog agents, and various methods have been proposed. Previous studies have proposed a guidance control law to guide a herd of sheep reliably, but the movement distance of a sheepdog required for guidance has not been considered. Therefore, in this study, we propose a novel guidance algorithm in which a supposedly efficient route for guiding a flock of sheep is designed via Traveling Salesman Problem and evolutionary computation. Numerical simulations were performed to confirm whether sheep flocks could be guided and controlled using the obtained guidance routes. We specifically revealed that the proposed method reduces both the guidance failure rate and the guidance distance.
Adaptive Multi-NeRF: Exploit Efficient Parallelism in Adaptive Multiple Scale Neural Radiance Field Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have demonstrated significant potential for representing 3D scene appearances as implicit neural networks, enabling the synthesis of high-fidelity novel views. However, the lengthy training and rendering process hinders the widespread adoption of this promising technique for real-time rendering applications. To address this issue, we present an effective adaptive multi-NeRF method designed to accelerate the neural rendering process for large scenes with unbalanced workloads due to varying scene complexities. Our method adaptively subdivides scenes into axis-aligned bounding boxes using a tree hierarchy approach, assigning smaller NeRFs to different-sized subspaces based on the complexity of each scene portion. This ensures the underlying neural representation is specific to a particular part of the scene. We optimize scene subdivision by employing a guidance density grid, which balances representation capability for each Multilayer Perceptron (MLP). Consequently, samples generated by each ray can be sorted and collected for parallel inference, achieving a balanced workload suitable for small MLPs with consistent dimensions for regular and GPU-friendly computations. We aosl demonstrated an efficient NeRF sampling strategy that intrinsically adapts to increase parallelism, utilization, and reduce kernel calls, thereby achieving much higher GPU utilization and accelerating the rendering process.